Finding Auroville

In the first post of this current sequence of posts on Auroville’s autonomy, I had pointed out two often mentioned quotes of The Mother regarding her aspiration for a place which no individual person or group could lay claim to, and which instead belonged to the entirety of humanity. In her text A Dream from 1954, she writes: “There should be somewhere on earth a place which no nation could claim as its own”. And 1968’s The Auroville Charter starts with: “Auroville belongs to nobody in particular. Auroville belongs to humanity as a whole.” In the current debate regarding administrative control of Auroville, these quotes are used to bolster the argument that the Indian government should not have any significant say in the running of Auroville.

There is yet another oft cited quote of The Mother that is used to support this argument. Sometime around March 1970, when it was becoming clear that the money needed to build the township of Auroville was not forthcoming, The Mother was informed of rumours circulating in the Ashram that the Auroville project was to be handed over to another entity, which would enable money to flow to the project. To this she responded:

I do not know who told you that – but there is a misunderstanding somewhere because to hand over the management of Auroville to any country or any group however big it may be is an absolute impossibility. If it has been at all taken, it is without my knowledge – because I say to it an emphatic NO. [original emphasis]

This quote is taken as emphatic proof that no country or other organization should run Auroville. But then who did The Mother say should run Auroville? Is it the Aurovilians? At no point did The Mother even once mention that Aurovilians should be the ones running Auroville. In fact, she on multiple occasions mentioned that Aurovilians were here to work towards the transformation of consciousness, to work for and serve the Divine, and not to run the show.

While she was alive, The Mother first ran Auroville remotely via a committee of selected people. These were individuals from the Ashram or related to it one way or another, and were put in charge of different aspects of the nascent Auroville. Not one of them was Aurovilian. When this committee did not work out, she appointed an Ashramite to be her point person on Auroville, and managed Auroville through him. In all the organizational plans that had been drawn out for Auroville for when it was to become a larger township, administration by Aurovilians was nowhere in the picture.

We saw in the first post of this sequence that when The Mother was asked what the political organization of Auroville should be, she mentioned “divine anarchy”, a term that indicates the end of the need for external collective administrative mechanisms once the collective is spiritualized. But she also indicated that people are not yet ready to understand and realize this yet. At other times when discussing the same issue, this is what she had to say:

There will be no politics. The town will be directed by a Municipal Council, a committee of technicians, headed (in order to avoid any arbitrariness) by two people in authority who are no longer imprisoned by the mind, who possess true knowledge.

August 1966

If there is no representative of the supreme Consciousness (which can happen, of course), if there isn’t any, we could perhaps (this would be worth trying) replace him with the government by a small number – we would have to choose between four and eight, something like that: four, seven or eight – a small number having an intuitive intelligence. “Intuitive” is more important than “intelligence”: they should have an intuition that manifests intellectually. (From a practical standpoint it would have some drawbacks, but it might be nearer the truth than the lowest rung: socialism or communism.) All the intermediaries have proved incompetent: theocracy, aristocracy, democracy, plutocracy – all that is a complete failure.

…

The only thing that could be competent is the Truth-Consciousness choosing instruments and expressing itself through a certain number of instruments …

…

But all those participating in the experience would have to be absolutely convinced that the highest consciousness is the best judge of the most material things.

April 1968

The problem is always the same: those given the responsibility should be people with a … universal consciousness, of course, otherwise … Wherever there is a personal consciousness, it means someone incapable of governing – we can see how governments are, it’s frightful!

…

The conditions to organise – to be an organiser (it’s not “to govern,” it’s to organise) – the conditions to be an organiser should be these: no more desires, no more preferences, no more attractions, no more repulsions – a perfect equality for all things. Sincerity, of course, but that goes without saying: wherever insincerity enters, poison enters at the same time. And then, only those who are themselves in that condition can discern whether another is in it or not.

At present, all human organisations are based on: the visible fact (which is a falsehood), public opinion (another falsehood), and moral sense, which is a third falsehood!

March 1970

In the absence of the spiritual consciousness needed for a divine or spiritual anarchy in Auroville, The Mother indicates in the quotes above that it should be a small group of people who should be the organizers of Auroville, and this group should comprise of the people with the deepest (highest) spiritual consciousness. At no point did she mention any collective decision-making process involving all Aurovilians as the way forward. In fact the writings of both The Mother and Sri Aurobindo are replete with denunciations of democracy and democratic/majoritarian decision-making processes. For them democracy is at best a completely inadequate temporary stepping-stone on the path towards the ultimate goal of spiritual anarchy. Whenever The Mother spoke of the governance structure of Auroville, her focus was always on a few people with the spiritual development to make selfless decisions for the community.

And it was always this spiritual development which was the key to be able to govern and organize. She spoke of hierarchy, but one that was organized “around the most enlightened center”:

A hierarchic organisation grouped around the most enlightened centre and submitting to a collective discipline.

February 1969

At bottom, the problem almost boils down to this: to replace the mental government of intelligence by the government of a spiritualised consciousness.

December 1967

The first thing to be accepted and recognised by all is that the invisible, higher power … that this power is capable of governing material things for everyone in a much truer, happier and more beneficial way than any material power.

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… the true hierarchy [is] the hierarchy based precisely on each one’s power of consciousness …

April 1968

With these lofty organizational ideals on one side, what did The Mother think of the Aurovilians who had started to settle on the parcels of land that had been bought to build the township in those early years? Did she feel that they were ready to take on the responsibility of being the organizers of Auroville? While discussing the issue of a fire that had broken out in an Auroville warehouse in March 1972, she said:

Not only harmony, there is no unity, no sincerity, no consecration to the Divine, no faith, no confidence in the Divine.

A few days later, she said:

And they use the liberty for license, for the satisfaction of desires, and all these things that we truly have worked all our life to master, they indulge in dissipation. I am absolutely disgusted.

We are here to give up all desires and to turn towards the Divine and to become conscious of the Divine.

The Divine we seek is not far away and beyond reach: He lies at the very core of His creation and what He expects from us is to find Him and, through personal transformation, become capable of knowing Him, uniting with Him, and finally manifesting Him consciously. To this we must dedicate ourselves, it is our true raison d’être. And our first step towards this sublime realisation is the manifestation of the supramental consciousness.

To realise and manifest the Divine in our life is the way, not to become animals, living like cats and dogs.

Exactly the opposite; the majority of the population at Auroville is an infra-humanity and not a suprahumanity. So it is high time that all that must end. There are people who have just dropped in here and now when I tell them, “All that won’t do at all,” they answer, “We didn’t come here for this.” That is how it stands.

March 1972

As it is now, all those who want an easy life and to do what they please as they please, say, “Let’s go to Auroville!” It should be just the opposite. People should know that coming to Auroville means an almost superhuman effort for progress.

April 1972

With all this, she did not project an optimistic attitude towards the immediate future of Auroville:

I can see, I have truly the occasion to see that if I left, I have nobody here, it would be our destruction.

March 1972

Earlier, during a conversation in April 1971, she had said:

Listen, there’s quite a lazy group in Auroville! … People who don’t want to work.

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They’re terribly angry with me because I told them discipline is indispensable.

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There’s really a subhuman group over there.

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I suddenly felt I had lost my influence over those people. I tell them things – they couldn’t care less. … You see, I can’t make decisions anymore because they don’t listen to me. As long as they listened to me, it was easy – it was easy, there was an influence. Now, something has happened, I don’t have any authority at all anymore, so what can we do?

So on the one hand The Mother was talking about a small group of people leading Auroville based on the development of their spiritual consciousness, and on the other she had a very negative perception of the people who were coming and settling in Auroville. Time and time again she repeated that people should come to Auroville to focus on the transformation of consciousness, and that work was an indispensable part of this action. The idea of self-governance for Aurovilians was never on the cards for her. While she was alive, she was the administrative head of Auroville, just as she was the administrative head of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, and the Aurovilians were supposed to be here for the experiment of Auroville under her guidance, just as the Ashramites were to live under her guidance.

So when she said that it would be an “absolute impossibility” to “hand over the management of Auroville to any country or any group”, she was saying this because she was the spiritual leader of Auroville at the time. She was the “representative of the supreme Consciousness”, with the true knowledge and spiritual development to run the township.

For the time that she was not present anymore, her wish was for a small group of people with the deepest spiritual consciousness to run Auroville. And as she said above, it is people with the least amount of attachment to material things, including to power and authority, who are the ones most capable to administering Auroville. Among Aurovilians in general, this detachment from material things, including power and authority, will be a sign of their spiritual development. Unfortunately, as I had mentioned in the second post of this sequence, the clamour for administrative control of Auroville by a group of Aurovilians is a sure sign of the lack of this development. An indifference to power, control and authority should be the attitude, with the focus instead being on our work and spiritual development.

So we are in a position toady where Auroville neither has a spiritual leader to guide it, nor is there a small group of spiritually advanced people who can lead it. In the absence of these two modes of administration, what has been tried out over the past three decades, under the auspices of the Auroville Foundation Act, is a form of majoritarian, “community-based” decision-making process for all aspects of Auroville. And one needs only spend some time immersed in Auroville to see quite clearly and obviously that this process has failed. This autonomous administrative setup has turned Auroville into an isolated bubble that is governed and controlled by a small coterie of Aurovilian “politicians” (politicians with a small-p), and only people who conform and support the existing administrative framework are even allowed to become part of the institution. One of the reasons why the Indian government is now stepping in is to correct this administrative misdirection of the past few decades, and to help Auroville build its intended township.

As I mentioned above and in the previous post, the fact that some Aurovilians are fighting the current intervention by the Indian government tooth and nail is a sign of how much they are clinging to power, control and authority. Instead, they should acknowledge that the administration of Auroville has been, is and will continue to be a vexing issue, the solution to which lies solely in our individual and collective spiritual transformation, and that is what we should focus on. In the long future that Auroville has, there will be different administrative solutions that will be implemented and tried out, and the current situation, with the Indian government taking a more active role, is simply the next solution that will be tried out. This is all part and parcel of the experiment that we are part of here in Auroville. Different administrative solutions will be tried one after another, as part of the intersection between spiritual progress and its manifestation in the material realm. And as Sri Aurobindo and The Mother have said, each of these solutions will fail, because the answer does not lie in material, mechanical administrative solutions. However, each of these prospective solutions will be a step in the journey towards the advent of the spiritual anarchy that will finally lead humanity towards the evolutionary future envisioned in Integral Yoga.

Auroville belongs to nobody in particular, Auroville belongs to humanity as a whole. No one group can lay claim to Auroville as a conceptual and spiritual project, because it is a universal project. The land that Auroville resides on is a part of India and will be so till the conception of nations, international borders and the ownership of land themselves dissolve. The jurisdiction and administration of Auroville as a material entity will ultimately also lie with India until that time. A self-governing mechanism has been tried over the past three decades and failed. The Indian government is now implementing some guidelines and rules for the project to work with and move forward. The focus of Aurovilians should be on our spiritual transformation, and not on holding on to power and control. Letting go of our desire for power, control and authority is the only way to get it back. As long as we have space to grow spiritually, as long as we have “spiritual autonomy” so to speak, we will have the flexibility needed to advance the project forward in its intended direction.